Sara Khameis's mother is Finnish, and her father is a Jordanian. Sara has grown up in Amman, the capital of Jordan. She received a bachelor degree in biotechnology in Jordan and then applied for a Master's degree in Finland.

This year Slush came back bigger and better than ever with 20 000 attendees, 2 600 startups, 1 600 investors and 600 journalists. Slush was held dec 4-5 in Messukeskus, the Helsinki Exhibition Center. The trends of this year included artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, machine learning, blockchain and sustainability. There were lots of inspirational speakers including Werner Vogels, Julia Hartz, Katarina Berg and Casey Winters.

Startup Refugees is one of the leading NGOs in Finland that helps asylum seekers and refugees by assisting them with starting a business or finding employment. I met with Maiju Mitrunen, the Head of Business & Employment Programs, in their office in Helsinki and we talked a little bit about the work they do.

A group of around 20 members of the far-right group, who call themselves “Soldiers of Odin” arranged a show off in the Puhos shopping mall in eastern Helsinki on Monday evening, frightening and intimidating immigrants. Puhos is a small shopping mall adjacent to Itis. The outdated mall has been rented out to mainly ethnic shops and restaurants. Visitors of the mall are almost all from Somali, Kurdish, Arab and other immigrant groups.

Mohammed received two negative decisions to his request for asylum and exhausted from the process, he returned voluntarily to Iraq. He now lives in Baghdad. In a phone call, Mohammed talks about why he left Iraq, the case and how he’s getting on back at home.

Taha fled Iraq for love. Unfortunately that’s not a reason good enough to stay in his adopted home in Finland. He went underground and now lives in Kirkkonummi with a Finnish family who wanted to help. Taha is one of thousands of undocumented immigrants in Finland.

THE31st HELSINKI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, also referred to as Rakkautta & Anarkiaa (Love & Anarchy), came to a close on Sunday, having drawn in record breaking numbers. This year’s film festival attracted more than 60,000 visitors and featured almost 500 screenings.

It has now been three years since the biggest migration wave flowed into Europe in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people headed towards the European continent. Although news coming from the Middle East showed a dramatic escalation in migration after the extensive uprisings and revolutions, none of the governments or politicians in the European Union were expecting what is known today as the European migrant crisis.

Helsinki fashion week is the first fashion event focusing on 100% sustainable production and brands. This year the event was held in an exciting old oil tank, transformed into exhibition centre, located in Laajasalo, Helsinki. While the shows were held inside the oil tank, and an eco village was set up outside.

Like much of Europe, Finland is cultivating a flourishing casino industry. As of writing, there are a total of eight cities throughout Finland that are home to at least one casino, with 16 gambling facilities situated amongst these territories.

THE FORECAST for the weekend of the 21st Tuska Open Air Metal Festival was not looking too good the week before. Torrential rains were promised for Friday and Saturday with temperatures around 10 degrees Celsius - Finnish summer at its best. Metalheads from all around the world were praying to the weather gods and stocking up on raincoats, rubber boots and gloves in preparation for yet another wet festival.

The frequent occurrence of extreme climate conditions is threatening the life of urban dwellers. Currently, more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By 2050 this will increase to 70 percent. With rapid growth of urbanization comes rapid changes in the landscape that affect the climate and air quality in urban areas, leading to higher temperatures – or “heat islands” – higher emissions, and more ambient pollutions. During the summer, the higher urban temperatures may lead to more frequent health problems, and actually increase the mortality rate among the most vulnerable urban dwellers including elders and less economically fortunate, for example.

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There was a time in America when spreading the wealth was instrumental in the nation becoming an economic powerhouse. In this age that sees money and assets tightly controlled in the hands of the few, it’s time to revisit that philosophy. The road map for finding that equilibrium on the new economic frontier? Universal Basic Assets.

Since its founding, the United States has faced a continuing dilemma around the distribution of wealth. On the one hand, allowing some concentration of capital in the hands of a few leads to investment and economic growth. On the other, spreading some of the wealth helps maintain a cohesive and functioning democracy.

As early as 1785, Thomas Jefferson described this dilemma in a letter to James Madison: “The property of this country is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands … I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”

Today, we feel this dilemma acutely, and it is urgent that we restore the balance between wealth accumulation and distribution, between economic growth and economic equity. The Institute for the Future’s framework of universal basic assets (UBA) offers an approach for doing so. UBA identifies a fundamental set of “resources,” or assets, we believe are essential to having sustainable livelihoods. Such assets include everything from money to education, health coverage, and housing – things that people can use and leverage to generate greater economic prosperity for themselves and their families. We focus on three broad classes of assets: private – things like money, land, and housing; public – infrastructure and services like education, health, public utilities, etc.; and open – or a growing category of mostly digital assets that are communally created and open to everyone – think Wikipedia and other open-source resources.

The point of UBA is not to collectivize or seize and distribute resources, but to ensure that people are given opportunities to thrive in a rapidly shifting economy. It can serve as a guide for designing actions and policies aimed at widening access to such resources.

For example, today most investment mechanisms give preference to those investments that provide substantial returns to a few, rather than fostering wider equity and asset ownership, thus exacerbating economic inequality. Venture funds promote investments that promise large returns to founders and a few initial investors. Bank loans follow similar patterns and flow to larger, established companies.

We must design policies and funding mechanisms to encourage capital flows to more distributive initiatives, such as cooperatives and employee stock owned companies. Even nonprofit platforms, such as Wikipedia or open-sourced artificial intelligence can give people access to valuable knowledge and tools. We can also give people ownership of their data so it can be used as an asset they themselves – rather than monopolistic platforms such as Google, Facebook and others – can leverage and capture economic value from.

If this approach sounds new or novel, it isn’t.

In the early years of the American Republic, we achieved equilibrium by distributing land, which was the key resource, or asset, in those days. Passed into law in 1862, Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act granted any U.S. citizen or intended citizen the right to claim up to 160 acres of frontier land, or land that was in the public domain that they would cultivate. It not only gave the means of production to hundreds of thousands of people, but ensured development and cultivation of the new territories, enlarging the market for all citizens. The United States would not be what it is today without such an ingenious act of socio-economic engineering.

With the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, agricultural land was no longer key to economic viability for many. The book Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into the Democracy describes how a different kind of asset – jobs with guaranteed wages and all the ensuing benefits, such as pensions, equity participation, guaranteed vacations, health insurance and more – became a primary way to participate in the economy.

Today, we are in the midst of another economic transition – a transition reminiscent of the country’s shift from agrarian to industrial economy. Fewer people are engaged in formal full-time employment at companies that offer good wages and benefits, such as equity ownership, health insurance and retirement savings.

Instead, we see a growing number of people working as freelancers and in gig, seasonal, temporary and other types of nontraditional jobs. Think of Uber, Upwork, and Taskrabbit. Yes, some people working on those platforms benefit from the flexibility of such arrangements. But they are no longer stakeholders in the enterprises for which they work and most lack stability, social protections and benefits, adding to growing income disparities.

Abundant data points to this. While shareholder returns have been growing exponentially, wages and incomes have been stagnant. The number of people who own stock has been declining for the past 10 years and stock ownership has become increasingly unequally distributed. Ten percent of the population owns more than 80 percent of shares on the stock exchanges today. French economist Thomas Piketty and others have documented that economic returns are disproportionately accruing to asset holders (primarily owners of financial assets and land) rather than wage earners.

In fact, this has been true for a long time. Those with assets who can leverage them to generate more assets are the winners in the economic game. Two hundred years ago, these were large landholders, 50 years ago, they were top wage earners who were also equity owners in companies for which they worked. Today, our economy is more complex than it was during the settlement of the frontier or even when GM employed close to a million workers in well paying, stable jobs with expansive benefits, including stock ownership.

We are facing a new frontier, and just like our founding fathers, who thought deeply about how to distribute land, we must figure out the core assets people need in order to live good and sustainable lives now and in the future. The universal basic assets framework will help us restore a balance in our fractured economy, and guide us in reaching a new equilibrium between accumulation and distribution, and growth and equity.

Marina Gorbis is a futurist and social scientist who serves as executive director at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Silicon Valley nonprofit research and consulting organization. In her 19 years with IFTF, Marina has brought a futures perspective to hundreds of organizations in business, education, government and philanthropy – helping to improve the capacity for innovation, develop strategies, and design new products and services. Marina's current research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries, a topic explored in detail in her book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. She has written for FastCompany and Harvard Business Review and keynoted such international events as The Next Web Conference, NEXT Berlin and the World Business Forum.